Dear Gil, do you agree that (1) the generalization of commodity production depends on the general (though not universal) commodification of labor power as alienated by doubly free proletarians in the role of juridical subjects? (2) that interest bearing capital and merchants capital (considered only its role of circulating commodities) cannot systematically increase the *value in circulation* (given how Marx defines value), though both interest bearing and merchants capital can indeed result in surplus value and merchants capital (as narrowly considered) can increase the use value (again as defined by Marx) of commodities to their owners? (3) do you agree that it is reasonable to understand Marx as suggesting this kind of historical dialectic: only through the new circuit of industrial capital do we have not only the result of surplus value but also the systematic increase of the the value in circulation; and merchants and interest bearing capital, though older forms of capital, now usually (but not always) derive from the value newly added in and through the newer circuit of industrial capital and are themselves thereby changed in character? "Industrial capital gives to production its capitalist character. Its existence includes that of class antagonism between capitalists and labourers. To the extent it assumes control over social production, the technique and social organization of the labor process are revolutionized and with the economic and historical type of society. The other kinds of capital, which appear before the industrial capital amid past or declining conditions of social production, are not only subordinated to it and suffer changes in mechanism of their functions corresponding with it, but move on it as a basis; they live and die, stand and fall, as this, their basis, lives and dies, stands and falls. Money capital and commodity capital, in so far as they appear and function as bearers of their own peculiar branches of business alongside industrial capital, are now only modes of existence of the various functional forms that industrial capital constantly assumes and discards within the circulation sphere" Marx, Capital, vol II, p. 136 (penguin, though I mixed in Korsch's translation). I understand Marx here to be arguing that merchants capital or interest bearing capital (or rent) cannot simply be isolated and compared across social systems; rather while these elements share formal resemblances across social systems, they have radically different implications when parts of different 'totalities'. So here Marx would be more like Radcliffe Brown than Frazer in social anthropology (given Edmund Leach's summary). Again, this kind of theorizing has to be part of an inductive-historical approach of the sort Marx commended in Richard Jones whose contribution to Marx's method has simply been expunged in contemporary scholarship. I should also add this unrelated point: note how Marx emphasizes the importance of industrialization of production and the continuous revolution in productive technique to the character of bourgeois society; how can this aspect receive the attention it deserves if one is focused on the simple ownership of assets and the possibility of exploitation in and through exchange (or even the exogeneity of the distributional struggle to price and profit determination)? Wouldn't Marxists be better off thinking through Veblen on the character of industrial society? Yours, Rakesh
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